Scientists at Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when an unshakable belief is held by just 10 percent of the population, that belief will always be adopted by the majority of society. Here is an article link to their findings.

The latest gallop poll for the republican nomination shows Rick Perry at 29%, Mitt Romney at 17% and Ron Paul in third place at 13%.

This was reinforced in another article here, which intelligently points out:

It is not that the media think that Paul can win. Romney has too much support. What scares them is Paul’s message. It is resonating with too many voters, especially those under 30. These voters are learning that they are not alone. The people who own the mainstream media recognize this threat. When people find out that millions of voters share their anti-Establishment views, this gives them confidence.

Worse, Paul is building a huge mailing list. This mailing list can be as powerful as Richard Viguerie’s was. Viguerie got his list from the list of Goldwater's donors in 1964. He built the modern conservative political movement with those 12,000 names and addresses. Paul will have a million email names and addresses — maybe more. And he can mail without paying postage.

This is a political turning point — the biggest in 48 years. Maybe more.

And not just email...the Internet as a whole provides countless ways to communicate...not only allowing the dissemination of these ideas at a speed unheard of even just 10 years ago, but also organization like no one would imagine. And remember, Paul gets literally half the entire youth vote. Bring it up to voters under 40 and he's still carrying 40%. And he constantly has to remind everyone who tries to get him to let up on the foreign policy issue that that's precisely where a large bulk, if not most of his support comes from...the young people who understand, with true comprehension of what liberty and security is all about.

This is the future we're looking at. These are the people who will be running industry and infiltrating government. And just think...their kids will beraised on this stuff. They won't even have to go through the ideological journey and hardship ofunlearning all the nonsense indoctrinated into them that their parents did.

To score a contract with the school, Pizza Hut had to navigate 31 pages of bid documents. The city's bid document for algebra tutors is only 13 pages.

The document details exactly when the pizza should arrive and what it should look like, right down to the number of pepperoni slices; forty-four per pie, all placed on top of the cheese, two ounces cheese per slice. It must come in a box that doesn't stick to the cheese. And if requested, there must be free pizzas for taste tests. Plus, Pizza Hut must provide pizza cutters, pizza cutting guides, posters for the school and designate a pizza coordinator to keep the deliveries on track.

I don't really know what to say that we don't already all know. Someone want to say it for me?

I had always been impressed by the fact that there are a surprising number of individuals who never use their minds if they can avoid it, and an equal number who do use their minds, but in an amazingly stupid way. - Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols

A milepost on our regression back to the Dark Ages. Khan should be released without charges and the US government should be sued to oblivion. "Oh, but he's clearly guilty!" Of what? Guilty of being detained and accused by the US government without due process, without access to proper legal representation, of being tortured by the US military? Seriously? Did I misread the calendar this morning or is it really 1510 AD?

At this point, it doesn't matter even if Khan is guilty. The mistreatment and abuse of the US government renders void any morally legitimacy it may have had and its claims are no longer credible. Naturally, they would accuse him of everything under the Sun - including manufacturing evidence if need be - to cover their asses. Look at what they did to Brandon Mayfield or, even more heartbreaking, poor Aafia Siddiqui. Using their own logic (that people must be punished as a lesson to others), the US government needs to be punished with public humiliation and material consequences (monetary damages) in order ot be taught a lesson not to engage in this outrageous abuse which it is continuing to this day.

Despite running a decade-long campaign of torture in secret prisons, indefinite detention, false accusations and so on, not one general or admiral has been stripped of his rank and medals. Not one cabinet officer has been forced to step down. Not one President impeached.

Since we're all about national holidays to remember things, why don't we petition to create a National Day of Mourning for the Sins Committed in the War of on Terror? Surely, torture is a sin. Surely, ripping children out of a mother's arms and abandoning them to whatever fate may come to them is a sin. I'm sick of the white-washing.

Andrew Schiff was sitting in a traffic jam inCaliforniathis month after giving a speech at an investment conference about gold. He turned off the satellite radio, got out of the car and screamed a profanity.

"I'm not Zen at all, and when I'm freaking out about the situation, where I'm stuck like a rat in a trap on a highway with no way to get out, it's very hard," Schiff, director of marketing for broker-dealer Euro Pacific Capital Inc., said in an interview.

Schiff, 46, is facing another kind of jam this year: Paid a lower bonus, he said the $350,000 he earns, enough to put him in the country's top 1 percent by income, doesn't cover his family's private-school tuition, a Kent,Connecticut, summer rental and the upgrade they would like from their 1,200-square- foot Brooklyn duplex.

"I feel stuck," Schiff said. "The New York that I wanted to have is still just beyond my reach."

The smaller bonus checks that hit accounts across the financial-services industry this month are making it difficult to maintain the lifestyles that Wall Street workers expect, according to interviews with bankers and their accountants, therapists, advisers and headhunters.

"People who don't have money don't understand the stress," said Alan Dlugash, a partner at accounting firm Marks Paneth & Shron LLP in New York who specializes in financial planning for the wealthy. "Could you imagine what it's like to say I got three kids in private school, I have to think about pulling them out? How do you do that?"

The journal’s editor, Prof Julian Savulescu, director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, said the article's authors had received death threats since publishing the article. He said those who made abusive and threatening posts about the study were “fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society”.

They argued: “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.”

Rather than being “actual persons”, newborns were “potential persons”. They explained: “Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life’.

It turns out that Google, maker of the Android mobile operating system, takes it one step further. Android apps do not need permission to get a user’s photos, and as long as an app has the right to go to the Internet, it can copy those photos to a remote server without any notice, according to developers and mobile security experts. It is not clear whether any apps that are available for Android devices are actually doing this.

To demonstrate how vulnerable images are on Android devices, Ralph Gootee, an Android developer and chief technology officer of the software company Loupe, put together a test application that appears to be a simple timer. Installing the app produces a notification that it wants to be able to access the Internet, but there is no notice about photos. When the app is started and the user sets the timer, the app goes into the photo library, retrieves the most recent image and posts it on a public photo-sharing site.

A project some friends and I are working on is gardening some unused land. A house across the street from my girlfriend's has been unoccupied for about 4-5 years (house is foreclosed on, bank owns it, etc.) Besides using the drive way for my own convenience we decided to actually use the land. Lucky enough there were already shovels and hoes in the shed of it's backyard. We figure if we at least keep the front yard in good condition there's no reason for the landscapers to come by and mess anything up (when we start planting/growing I'll put up a sign in the backyard that says something like "community garden" or to that extent).

Picture below is of some yesterday work I did myself. Re-tilled the area we're working with and set up some barriers I had to dig out along the back fence.

I had always been impressed by the fact that there are a surprising number of individuals who never use their minds if they can avoid it, and an equal number who do use their minds, but in an amazingly stupid way. - Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols

Mitt Romney's had Secret Service detail (tax payer-funded, of course) for a long time now. Santorum had to pretend he was important enough to need it, so he asked for it and got it. You think Ron Paul has government protection?

Have you asked permission from the bank? I'm not sure it appreciates having it's property messed with.

I take this as sarcasm whether or not you were being so, but no we have no intention to ask the bank. You'll see a real estate agent stop by every 6 months or so, but ever since the cops kicked my friend out for living there about a year and a half ago the house is now "condemned" (there's nothing structurally wrong with the house, they just need a reason to keep people out, as well as boarding up the back door that would never actually lock - luckily the one guy in the neighborhood who'd actually call the cops for something like that moved away). Again, this house has been unoccupied for 4-5 years. I've been using the driveway for a year and a half and someone even parked their boat/trailer on the side of the house. I think the neighborhood has already (gradually) appropriated it. Might as well make use of it.

I had always been impressed by the fact that there are a surprising number of individuals who never use their minds if they can avoid it, and an equal number who do use their minds, but in an amazingly stupid way. - Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols

Solve For X, an experimental Google-sponsored conference where entrepreneurs, innovators and scientists propose technological solutions to the world's biggest problems, before posting videos of their talks online.

Sounds like some potentially interesting talks, right? Read on...

Google hopes to encourage what it calls "moonshot thinking"—the application of breakthrough technology to global challenges in radically new ways. The inaugural meeting in California saw speakers making such audacious suggestions as carbon-negative biofuels, low-energy water desalination and, appropriately enough, 20km-high launch towers for spacecraft.

Oh boy. This appears to be the kind of eugenics-era social engineering mentality that's really just a narrow, bigoted sub-view of looking at the world. Humanity is just drowning in "global challenges", and the way to fix them is to get enough smart people into a room to determine the next big social engineering project. And they assume that the world works this way before they even start debating, yet they present it all as scientific and open-minded. Incidentally their first example is carbon-negative biofuels, I wonder which totally uncontroversial global challenge that's about. Not only are they not taking emergent order and market solutions seriously, they are outright assuming that they don't exist.

"They all look upon progressing material improvement as upon a self-acting process." - Ludwig von Mises

As a friendly request, can we not do the whole GIANT BOLD TEXT FOR HEADLINES thing? It makes the thread really cluttered. We're not looking at a newstand picking out a magazine, we're reading a thread. The huge text is unecessary.

Also, the "carcinogen" in cola coloring would require you to drink something like 6,000 cans a day to have any increased risk. Good luck with that.